One of the prime suspects in last year’s Mumbai terrorist attacks suddenly withdrew his confession on Friday and claimed he had been framed by police.
Mohammad Ajmal Kasab is on trial in Mumbai accused of being the lone surviving gunman from the attacks, in which 166 people died over three days in November last year.
Prosecutors are adamant Kasab is the young man seen clutching an automatic rifle and striding through the city’s railway station in a picture that has become the iconic image of the attacks.
Kasab insisted that this was not the case, smiling as he set out his new version of events. Far from arriving by sea with the other gunmen on the night the attacks began, he said, he had pitched up nearly three weeks earlier hoping to break into the Bollywood film industry and had been picked up by police three days before the attacks for being Pakistani.
It was his misfortune, he claimed, to be the doppelganger of one of the gunmen shot dead by police. Lacking a culprit to put on trial, they had taken him from his cell the day the attacks were launched, shot him to make it look as if he had been injured in the crossfire and then framed him, he said.
It was a remarkable twist, even in a week in which David Headley, the man alleged to have masterminded the attacks, was accused of acting as a double agent for the CIA and al-Qaeda. Kasab said Headley was one of four white men who came to his cell to interrogate him, before the judge silenced him on the grounds that it was not relevant.
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